Red Dead-nettle   -   Lamium purpureum

This plant usually first appears in March, and can be found for much of the rest of the year. The leaves of the Red Dead-nettle look less like nettles than those of the White Dead-nettle. The 'dead' part of the name refers to the fact that, although they look like nettle leaves, they don't actually sting.

The pink flowers of the Red Dead-nettle are small, and are clustered at the top of the plant, and the plant tends to be quite low-growing, never getting taller than around 25cm. It has the look of a 'weed', partly due to the habitats it can occur in, which include cultivated, disturbed and waste ground, and roadsides, as well as people's gardens.

Red Dead-nettle was used by people living in the countryside in different ways. It could be boiled and eaten as a pot herb, and was also used to make pig-swill. It also had uses in medicine, particularly to fight something called the 'King's Evil' or scrofula, which was a form of Tuberculosis that caused eruptions of the skin.